Cold Man in the Kremlin

WASHINGTON — Stephen Hanson, the vice provost for international affairs at the College of William and Mary, summed up what life has been like these past decades for people in his line of work. “I’m a Russia specialist,” he said. “Nobody has been interested in me for 20 years.”

Sure, relations with Moscow could be prickly, and there was that bloody little invasion of Georgia in 2008 that led to Russia recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia (close to 20 percent of Georgia’s territory) as independent states, but the consensus was that the Cold War struggle with Moscow was over, replaced by a “reset” relationship that hovered somewhere between cooperation and rivalry but would not lapse again into the outright confrontation of two ideologies.

In this scenario, experts like Hanson were not in heavy demand. Their field had become secondary. Russia was 20th-century news. New members of NATO like Poland or Estonia squawked from time to time about the enduring threat from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but their anxieties were dismissed as the hangover of decades within the mind-twisting Soviet empire.

Nothing was so certain to put audiences to sleep as talk of “trans-Atlanticism” or the need for increasing European military budgets. As the trauma of 9/11 faded and America’s wars wound down, “pivot to Asia” became the modish geopolitical phrase in Washington. Pivot to Europe was a laughable idea.

None of this was lost on Putin, who actually meant it when he described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, and for a decade and a half now has been intent on righting Russia’s perceived post-Cold-War humiliation in order to recreate, if not quite the Cold War, then a bipolar system in which Washington and Moscow offer opposing world views. Hanson says Putin “never embraced the borders of the Russian federation” and was always convinced “the West only likes leaders in Moscow, such as Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who weaken Russia.”

Putin’s push for a revived Soviet-like space reached its apotheosis (after the trial run in Georgia) with the annexation of Crimea (the German word for annexation is “Anschluss”), a watershed moment for Europe, where such an event had not happened since World War II. The Continent is once again combustible. The United States faces a foe in Moscow who laces his comments about America with contempt. This does not mean the Continent is about to lapse into war. It does mean trans-Atlantic unity is once again critical; imposing sanctions on a few second-level Putin lieutenants will not cut it as a Western response.

The language Putin understands is force and power. His meandering annexation speech made clear that he regards eastern Ukraine as wrongly usurped from Russia. If further Russian designs on Ukraine are to be stopped, President Obama has to respond to the Russian president in the idiom he understands. Providing U.S. Army rations as military support to Kiev amounts to history repeated as farce.

Ukraine, my colleague Michael Gordon reports, is seeking communications gear, mine-clearing equipment, vehicles, ammunition, fuel and medical gear, and the sharing of intelligence. Provide it. Hurt the oligarchs with their London mansions and untold billions parked in Western banks. Crimea may not be recoverable but the West must make clear it will not accept a Russian veto on E.U. and NATO expansion. But, some say, a firm response will end Russian cooperation on vital issues like Iran. Not so: Russia has its own interest in stopping nuclear proliferation, and even the Cold War did not preclude cooperation in some areas.

For Putin, “Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites” have seized power in Kiev. For Putin, “After the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet, we no longer have stability.” (Never mind that hundreds of millions of people gained their freedom.) The United States, the Russian president suggests, knows only “the rule of the gun.”

As during the Cold War, he will find his sympathizers and fellow travelers in the West with such paranoid gambits. Still, his words have to be taken seriously. They are those of a man trained in a totalitarian system and now proposing an alternative civilization of brutality, force, imperial expansion, systemic corruption, a cowed press, conspiracy theories and homophobia.

Tinatin Khidasheli, a member of the Georgian Parliament, told me: “After Georgia in 2008 I was asked what’s next and I said Ukraine and everyone laughed. But Putin was testing the West with us and saw he could proceed. People in Georgia are now very scared, and they are most scared of the inability of the West to give an adequate response. The only political consensus we have is that we want to join the E.U. and NATO, but in Brussels they don’t even want to call us a European state.”

Putin knows what he wants. A supine and disunited West does not. That’s why he’s winning — or has already won.